Well since for some reason Media Portal didn't want to work with my Vista PC, I used the PowerCinema 5.0 that came with the Hauppauge T500 stick. Patched it to the 2nd from last version as recommended. Sound worked without having to load the sound patch.
I then went and bought a 8600GT card. Applied the tweaks to get hardware acceleration working and this also worked.(I assume it has CPU usage has gone down but not as low as some people report - PowerCinema is using around 15% with CPU overall around 25-30% maybe a bit more in TV3. Previously TV3 was 90-95%
Everything seems to run pretty good once the TV channel comes in and changing channels is reasonably quick. The windows media centre remote seems to just work with PowerCinema too, without me actually installing any software or doing anythig.
However my problem is that when you first click on TV it takes an age to bring up the channel - I'm talking 3 or 4 minutes. Is this normal? Likewise if I switch to composite (to watch Sky channels) it takes an age also but comes up eventually. What load times are others experiencing? Guess I could try a fresh install. Maybe initially installing MyTV confused things?
Another annoyance is if I want to watch TV (Sky) in Vista Media Centre, if I click live TV on the remote it launches power cinema (which then hangs). Couldnt google an answer to this although found others that had the same issue.